Huntington Ingalls Industries [HII] Newport News Shipbuilding plans to use digital-only blueprints for the USS Enterprise (CVN-80), an investment that the company hopes will save more than 15 percent, a company executive said Tuesday.
Matt Mulherin, corporate vice president of HII and president of Newport News Shipbuilding, called the technology “a gamechanger.” Instead of working from paper blueprints, employees would be issued an iPad every day containing design information related to the day’s work, he said.
“We’ll have delivered the material to the deckplates,” he said during a briefing to reporters at Sea-Air-Space Exposition. “You’ll have everything you need to be able to go to work, and at the end of the day, you’ll plug your iPad back in and it now knows what progress you’ve made, it updates it for tomorrow. There is that capability to go do that.”
Newport News sees the aerospace industry’s work with digital design as a starting point for how to structure its own digital design plan.
“Shipbuilding is a little bit different, but we are looking at those areas to figure out how do we do this most efficiently, because this is a huge investment,” he said, adding that the company is still working through what that cost will be.
It expects to deliver the first in a new class of aircraft carriers, the USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN-78), to the Navy this September. The biggest challenge, Mulherin said, is ensuring the advanced technologies aboard the ship—such as the dual band radar, Advanced Arresting Gear (AAG), advanced weapons elevators and electromagnetic aircraft launching system (EMALS)—stick to their test schedules.
The first tests of EMALS and AAG launching and arresting a live aircraft will likely occur on the Ford before the year’s end, he said.
The Senate Armed Services Committee in their defense authorization bill wants the Navy to explore alternative options to replace the AAG, which lawmakers believe poses a cost and schedule risk. While other arresting systems exist that are similar to the Mk 7 system on Nimitz-class carriers, integrating them onto the Ford may be more difficult than expected and may not offer the same benefits, Mulherin said.
“The two systems, while they may perform the same functions as viewed from the flight deck, their integration to the ship is significantly different,” he said. “Advanced arresting gear really gives you added capabilities that advance the Nimitz class system.”